Michael Furay
It is odd that the former Chief of Naval Operations John Richardson (CNO, 2011-2015), was the force behind the resurrection of the book, The Rules of the Game (1996), by Andrew Gordon. The book went out of print before the United States Naval Institute Press republished it in 2013. The book, which examines the Royal Navy between the battles of Trafalgar and Jutland, has several lessons that the CNO deemed important enough to merit his intercession to bring it back into print, and he discussed these in his May 2017 remarks following a presentation at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
According to Richardson, "…there are a lot of interpretations about what the major messages of that book are…." For Richardson, the primary takeaway is that there is a tension between trusting a commander's initiative and understanding of the mission and the new technological ability to micromanage those commanders from Washington.
For many other readers, the book’s chief message is the difference between "ratcatchers" and "regulators." “Ratcatcher" was coined by Admiral of the Fleet Sir Walter Cowan. He was talking about his then battlecruiser senior, Admiral David Beatty, and his "ratcatching instinct for war." In short, Cowan deemed Beatty the consummate warrior. This view was in marked contrast to his opinion of Admiral of the Fleet John Rushworth Jellicoe, a quintessential "regulator." Regulators were those officers who achieved seniority during the years of peacetime, and from too much technological change. For regulators, this change became all-absorbing and minimized the primacy of warfighting and warrior admirals.
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